InfoPath Dev

We have an issue with users not getting newer versions of forms once published.  We think they might have answered the pop up question incorrectly but not sure.

We have discovered that InfoPath is caching older versions of our forms.  The information is stored in c:\documents and settings\%user%\local settings\Microsoft\InfoPath\FormsCache2.  Deleting the contents resolved the issue.

Since we use only XSN as everyone is on our network and no forms server, we would *** to find out how to tell the system to take the newer form from the server and possibly prevent forms from being cached.

Would manually deleting the FormsCache cause the pop up question to be reasked aboiut updating?

 Any suggestions?

Thanks

Hi OldRadio99 and welcome,

Congratulations! You have solved one the most vexing bugs still in the product - the dreaded forms cache issue. You can do this the hard way by deleting the folder, or just click Start->InfoPath, select All Forms, select the form that is bad and click Remove this Form. That will remove from the cache as well and it's much easier to accomplish than deleting the entire folder. In our experience this problem happens for anywhere from 1-3% of the users. It's a bug in InfoPath. Unfortunately, it was never fixed by Microsoft.

Happy trails!

Try this: When you publish the form using the Publish wizard, you select the output folder and filename - leave this as normal to overwrite your template with an updated version.

But then, in the box below which contains 'Form name' it defaults to the form's name initially given, or the filename of the template without the xsn bit.

Change this to something else, like blahForm v1, blahForm v2 etc etc, changing the version number value each time.

 Then when uses open a form, it will still upgrade from the new template file, but the form name changes and so the old cache is no longer valid and it creates a new cache for the new form name.

This seems to work for me with no bad side effects - the form updates fine, and the user never gets asked with that confusing 'use old form new form on my computer blah blah' - it's an aweful option message - and very confusing.

Hope this works for you too.

Thanks Skarn for the trick. I like this because it means you just republish and don't have to worry about removing the cache on multiple client computers. Of course, in reality, this usually only happens on 1 or 2 clients out of 1000 or so... so might be more work to publish than just remove the cache on those computers ...

The only issue with renaming the new form is that if you delete the old form template from the directory, any old forms still in a wokflow will not open.

 I have tried in 2007 to change the versioning options to say always update and do not give the user the option to upgrade.  So far in limited testing, that seems to work.

Thanks Microsoft for such a wonderful bug

My instructions weren't super clear - or perhaps, read them again -

Try saving the template with the same filename  but on the publishing wizard screen where you change the directory and filename for output, change the FORM NAME box (it's below the filename box) to something else - old forms should still connect to the template file and they will update themselves, but because the 'form name' has been changed, a different cache will be made for the template.

The only thing to watch out for is that the FORM NAME box auto changes to the filename every time by default - so you have to manually change it to something else/different.

 Again, it still may not work in your case, but since I've been doing this, I've never had the cache issue.